Indianapolis Track Map Poster

Under the asphalt at Indianapolis, the bricks are still there. Most of the 3.2 million laid in 1909 are still down there, and in September 2025, when crews milled out a few bumps at the exit of Turn 2, they saw daylight again, about 18 cm (7 in) down. Only one strip was never paved over: a yard of brick, 91 cm (3 ft), bare across the start-finish line.

The Speedway was built on farmland as a proving ground for Indiana’s young car industry, and its first event, in June 1909, was a gas balloon race. The first surface, crushed stone and tar, left drivers coated in dust, oil and tar, so that fall, in just over two months, 3.2 million Indiana-made bricks were laid by hand. The bricks soon earned it its nickname: The Brickyard. Asphalt covered the turns in the 1930s and the last bricks in October 1961.

By the end of the war, weeds were growing through the mortar of the main straight and most people assumed the land would become a housing development; a buyer was found that November, and the cars were back the next May. Today it is the original speedway, the first track ever to carry the name, and the largest sports seating facility in the world. The infield alone, 102 hectares (253 acres), could hold two Vatican Cities. Winners kneel to kiss the bricks, a habit that began as a joke in 1996.

The poster draws the idea the founder sketched first: a 3-mile oval with 2 miles of twisting road inside, drawn, the Speedway says, on a restaurant tablecloth. It did not fit, and the infield road course was only built in 2000, 91 years later. Today’s version, from 2014, runs clockwise through fourteen numbered turns, with the oval around it in a muted line and the Yard of Bricks lettered on the straight. Rosso, the burgundy edition, has the color of fired brick. On your wall, the bricks never get paved over.